Dressing up old ideas in post-modern clothes

Post-modern literary theory is touted as the latest and greatest, but it is actually based on an old-fashioned approach to how we know things.

When people ask me about post-modern literary theory, I am tempted to answer them by talking about the Holy Roman Empire -- which, famously, was not holy, was not Roman, and was not really an empire. In much the same way, post-modern literary theory is not literary, not really a theory, and certainly not post-modern.

As far as I can make out, what is called "postmodernism" is a style of thinking which has almost entirely taken over literature studies in universities, and is now spreading even into high schools. It is based on a philosophical school common in universities in continental Europe, originating in the thought of people such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan.

In literary studies it is distinguished by giving priority to the reader, not to the author. The text merely exists as an uninterpreted "given": it is up to the reader to construct his or her own interpretation of it. The distinction between the given and the constructed here is an important one.

All this seems a little strange to a philosopher brought up in the English-speaking tradition. To us, the most important post-modern philosopher is Wittgenstein, and he is both important and genuinely post-modern because he showed the emptiness of the modern project. (Those in continental Europe who are called "post-modernists" often speak of the "Enlightenment project", but for philosophers in the English-speaking countries "modernism" goes back to Descartes in the 17th century, well beyond the Scottish, English and German Enlightenments of the 18th century.)

Wittgenstein’s critique
The key idea of Descartes -- and, to a Wittgensteinian, his key mistake -- was to search for a solid foundation for knowledge, a foundation which would be indubitable and infallible. For a Wittgensteinian, no knowledge is indubitable or infallible: you can't know something unless at least someone - perhaps you on another occasion - could possibly be mistaken about it. He distinguished between a sentence such as "She is in pain" about which one might be mistaken, and for which a demand "what evidence do you have?" is relevant, and one such as "I am in pain", about which I cannot be mistaken, and for which I cannot be asked for the evidence. "I know she is in pain", for Wittgenstein, makes sense, a sense different from "She is in pain": but the sense of "I know I am in pain" is no different from that of "I am in pain". So the "I know" of "I know I am in pain" is redundant and senseless, and doesn't answer to any real knowledge at all, precisely because it is redundant and senseless.

Since Descartes was, mistakenly, searching for a completely infallible and indubitable foundation for all other knowledge, he fixed on his own internal conviction: since he was thinking, he knew he existed. It should be pretty clear that the "I know" of "I know I exist" does not differ from the "I know" of "I know I am in pain". Descartes thought that from this "knowledge" he could develop a knowledge of all the truths of logic, mathematics, and even of the existence and truthfulness of God. From the truthfulness of God followed the reality of the world outside him. But since "I know I exist" does not really express any knowledge at all, we cannot in fact develop any other kind of knowledge from it.

The modernist thinkers who came after did find not at all convincing his account of the foundation of knowledge, or of the way further truths could be developed from them. Writers like Spinoza and Leibniz tried to follow him in finding the foundations of knowledge in abstract rational principles -- hence the label of "rationalists" that is given to them. Thinkers in English-speaking countries, such as Locke, Berkeley and Hume, tried (and failed) to find a foundation for knowledge in what was immediately experienced in seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling. This is why they are called Empiricists -- those who base their theory of knowledge on sense-experience.

But both groups, the rationalists and the empiricists, were trying to answer Descartes' basic question, of how we can be infallibly sure of what we know. The same is true, with some qualifications, even of later philosophers, such as Kant and Hegel. But in any case, they tried to find a foundation for knowledge in what was immediately known to them -- that is, in the contents of their own minds. These contents were known only to themselves: then they faced the task of trying to escape from the prison of privacy they had shut themselves into, and to try to reach the external world.

No private knowledge
Wittgenstein drew attention to the fact that we have absolutely no knowledge that is entirely private and has no connection with the outside world. What we know, even of our own mind, is based on what we know of the external world. The word "red" doesn't mean this experience I can create for myself when I close my eyes and conjure up a visual image, or even this patch in the middle of my visual field when I open my eyes and look directly in front of me, without attempting to alter my visual field. (You or I would say "by turning my head or by swivelling my eyes", but the empiricists would say that all we are directly aware of is our visual field: that we have eyes or a head at all is a constructed inference.) But for Wittgenstein and those who follow him, what "red" means is something publicly accessible, such as the colour of the evening sky, or of fire-engines, or of mail-boxes in the United Kingdom. The foundations of meaning, and therefore of knowledge, are not private but public.

But there is more. The whole distinction between the foundations and what is built on them - the distinction between the "given" and the "constructed" -- is a false one, if we take it in an absolute sense. We can perhaps sometimes see that some of our concepts are more basic than others - perhaps our concept of "right-angled triangle" is constructed on the basis of our concept of "triangle" -- but there is no absolutely basic set of concepts. As Elizabeth Anscombe once said (she was one of Wittgenstein's closest disciples, and his literary executor), if we are asked "What is given?" we have to say "the lot" -- everything we know about. It all forms part of what Willard Quine, another 20th century English-speaking philosopher, called a "seamless web" of concepts.

Post-modern, but still old-fashioned
So much for the followers of Wittgenstein, who I take to have made an entirely successful overthrow of the Cartesian, modern problem. But when we look at those who call themselves "post-modernists", we find that they are still tangled up in the old modernist distinction of "the given" and "the constructed". The text is the "given", and each one's interpretation of it is the "constructed": with the proviso that anyone's interpretation is as good as anyone else's.

A baby has been thrown out with the bathwater here. In their anxiety to be rid of "Enlightenment rationality" the post-modernists have thrown out rationality altogether. One suspects that they have never read any ancient or medieval thinkers, and that therefore they have no idea what a genuinely non-modern rationality would look like. What is more, as well as throwing out the baby, they have kept some very evil-smelling dregs of the bathwater, in the shape of the distinction of the given and the constructed. They are not real rebels against modernity, merely its bastard children. They have kept some modern notions while they reject others, and rejected some notions (such as rationality) which do not belong properly to modernism at all, but are part of the human way of looking at the world.

Above all, what rules in post-modernism is subjectivism -- what is individual, immediate, private to one's own experience. This is not to escape from modernism, but to surrender oneself wholeheartedly to it. It has been said, and I think accurately, that post-modernism is a cure for which no adequate disease has yet been found.

Christopher Martin teaches philosophy at the University of St Thomas in Houston, Texas.